Let’s tell everyone how to make a virus that could kill millions!

Here’s an idea: why don’t we just tell everybody in the world how to make an airborne H5N1 influenza virus strain (“bird flu”) that has been genetically altered to be easily transmissible (between ferrets, which mostly closely mimic the human response to flu), and which if released, could trigger an influenza pandemic, quite possibly with many millions of deaths?

OK, it seems like a totally evil idea, one that even Dr. Josef Mengele, the “angel of death,” probably wouldn’t have hatched. But not to virologist Dr. Ron Fouchier of Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, who wants to publish a paper describing how he did it, Science Insiderreveals.

Dr. Ron Fouchier: "probably one of the most dangerous viruses you can make"

Fouchier, whose research is funded by NIH, admits this is “probably one of the most dangerous viruses you can make,” but has already gone ahead and presented the study at a September meeting in Malta.

The paper he’s written — along with another one on H5N1, with comparable results, by a team led by virologist Dr. Yoshihiro Kawaoka at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and the University of Tokyo — is currently under review by the U.S. National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB), which could recommend it not be published, but has no authority to block it.

“The specter of an H5N1 pandemic keeps flu scientists up at night because of the virus’ power to kill,” warns Science Insider. “Of the known cases so far, more than half were fatal.”

Comments (29)

Viruses don’t kill people. People kill people.
When viruses are outlawed, only outlaws will have viruses.
When good people carry deadly viruses, the world is safer.
I need to keep a killer virus under my pillow to protect my family from a criminal entering my home at night.

Okay, I fully realise that I’m probably pretty much alone here but I’m more than fine with that. What on earth is insane about this? Could somebody please enlighten me as to what exactly humans staying around much longer on Earth is good for? Seriously, tell me, what good we are doing.
Since 1977, approximately 33% of all species on Earth have become extinct. That’s barely scratching the surface of the incredible amount of damage that humans are doing whilst going about their lives enjoying more ‘progress’ along with the post-90′s obsessions(reality tv, celebrity, mobiles, consumerism, body-mod, tv’s, social networks, mobiles, mobiles, mobiles…). Yes, some of those were there before, but pot mid-90′s they have gone through the roof to the level of fundamental shifts taking place with people(female>male)in the space of barely a decade.
There is simply too much to address here, both on a global as well as an individual level, that is happening right now and that is getting worse with each passing month, if only one has the eyes to see.
Leave ones front door to see the inmates running the asylum. Where the fuck do all of you think we are going? Soylent Green doesn’t come close.
I ask again, what exactly of benefit are humans bringing to this planet with our continued stay here? I really do want to know, because I think what this chap proposes is the opposite of insane.
If the fallout of a virus such as this outside of human-impact was fairly minimal then I understand perfectly where he is coming from.
Reading all these comments is genuinely depressing. As long as we all get to go on having the lives we have alongside our horrific little fancies, then bugger thought, awareness and compassion.
Read these following few words, try to see the truth in them, and weep for the future of every other animal on this plant besides the humans.

‘… living creatures and the earth itself are but afterthoughts to trivial things we imbue with absurd importance.’

ouch thats bitter. what gives any1 the right to say we aren’t doing exactly what our mother (earth) wants us too ? If there isn’t some sort of give/take relationship i dont believe we are being very usefull or productive. We are still a young species and ofcourse must make mistakes in order to learn. Anyway I don’t take this article too serious because we can what if all day

Maybe you should crawl back under your philosophical rock and wait for the plague to pass over you. Then you can come out and talk to the animals like Dr. Doolittle. People like you worry me more than this misguided biologist. Another possible solution for you is to become a Muslim and commit a suicide bombing, thereby going straight to heaven to claim your 72 virgins. Good luck.

Unfortunately, the world is full of people just like you. That’s the problem.
I have no idea what you are trying to say here, all I get is silly noise, which I suspect is mostly what goes in through your eyes.
Why don’t you tell me exactly why I am so ‘wrong’ in the simply awful view that I have expressed.
You do not see the levels of destruction taking place because of the wonderful progress humans make?
The content and tone of your response speaks volumes. Good luck.

When life first began it didn’t use oxygen. Then an organism came along and made lots of oxygen. It killed the world of anaerobic bacteria.. There have been many die offs. Sometimes from a single species. It doesn’t make mankind right , but it makes us a part of nature. Nature blindly enforces one rule, Dominance. Morality really doesn’t enter the natural world. We are the ones who think of things in terms of right or wrong. I tend to support your point of view. I think it’s a sentiment that can be harnessed for good. We must have a sense of perspective. An understanding of where we came from and why. We are about to gain supremacy over the material world. A little retrospection is in order.

There is only one force that we can prove exists, and it has nothing to do with religion, and everything to do with life on earth. Human hubris assumes that because of us, the planet will become barren….nothing could be further from the truth! We may try to destroy our own species, but the force of nature has always and will always create, adapt, and destroy…indiscriminately! Perhaps our efforts at destruction will happily end in a new and improved species of humans…minus the element of “greed”!
From “The Guardian” -UN Environment Program: 200 Species Extinct Every Day, Unlike Anything Since Dinosaurs Disappeared 65 Million Years Ago . What’s wrong with this statement? Dinosaurs never became extinct…they mutated! Fossil evidence also demonstrates that birds and dinosaurs shared features such as hollow, pneumatized bones, gastroliths in the digestive system, nest-building and brooding behaviors. The ground-breaking discovery of fossilized Tyrannosaurus rex soft tissue allowed a molecular comparison of cellular anatomy and protein sequencing of collagen tissue, both of which demonstrated that T. rex and birds are more closely related to each other than either is to the alligator. (Science 316 (5822) 290-295) It has been estimated that people of all professional categories claim that 86% of all species remain, as yet, unknown to man. Through evolution, new species arise through the process of speciation—where new varieties of organisms arise and thrive when they are able to find and exploit an ecological niche—and species become extinct when they are no longer able to survive in changing conditions or against superior competition. The relationship between animals and their ecological niches has been firmly established. A typical species becomes extinct within 10 million years of its first appearance, although some species, called living fossils, survive virtually unchanged for hundreds of millions of years. Most extinction have occurred naturally, prior to Homo sapiens walking on Earth: it is estimated that 99.9% of all species that have ever existed are now extinct.

Is it not a basic problem that the only way to make a name for yourself in science is to publish stuff, and the more controversial the better? What should these guys do, toil in obscurity, fail to make the cut, and wind up flipping burgers, or risk killing a few million (or billion) and become widely known scientists? Could we rechannel their careers into, say, rainforest conservation?

In another vein this reminds me of “The Lathe of Heaven” where the dreamer alleviates overcrowding with a plague that reduces Earth’s pop to ~1 billion. Is this a solution (NOT) for global warming, resource depletion, etc?

If you are trying to be witty you’ve missed by half. Dr. Fouchier should end up flipping hamurgers for a stunt like this. Let’s hope cooler heads prevail and this information is suppressed, otherwise you end up cracking wise with St. Peter at the Pearly Gates.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Lincoln Laboratory have developed and demonstrated a novel broad-spectrum antiviral approach, called DRACO—which stands for double-stranded RNA activated caspase oligomerizer—that may prove to be effective against virtually all viruses, including HIV and hepatitis, according to a report published online by PLoS One. DRACOs selectively induce apoptosis, or cell suicide, in cells containing any viral double-stranded RNA, rapidly killing infected cells without harming uninfected cells.

Our government is too busy arguing about evolution to do anything about this. Hopefully, private funding from one of our major foundations can be found, hopefully before we all die in a bird flu pandemic. Thanks for the information and, again, I hope that readers of the Kurzweil blog will follow up on this issue.

I hope that Kurzweil follows up on this story. This is something that affects us all. Hopefully this idiocy can be contained. It reminds me of Jeff Goldblum’s classic line in “Jurassic Park” where he posed the question that it is not what we can do but what we should do. This beats the hell out of recreating dinosuars on a deserted island.

I relayed this article to the NIH and I have received a response from them that they are also monitoring the situation which made me feel somewhat better. This isn’t something any of us can take casually and I would hope all of you who read Ray Kurzweil’s website would also do all you can to alert people to this.

I think that using only existing methods (i.e. vaccines) to thwart the threat of such outbreaks in the future may be completely insufficient and as such pose great threat to the entire human race possibly. Knowing the methods used for the manufacture and deployment of such a tool are other avenues for defense that can and should be developed for external prevention as well as development of human immune system enhancements that should already be under way. Any other ideas?

Yet another reason to colonize the moon and beyond: we need a backup for humanity and strive for it before a major technological backslash resulting from a major catastrophe makes this goal out of reach.

Too bad that so many bright young men are engaged in (bogus) financial engineering instead of “real” engineering.

We are already at the point were a motivated individual could put something together that could cause great harm. It’s not 50 years out. It’s today.
Eventually something like how we deal with computer viruses will need to be depoloyed. Not just for humans, but all bio things.

I suggest you enjoy the relatively carefree world we have right now. It’s going to change quite dramatically this decade.

I’m not talking about killing a dozen people, I’m talking about eliminating a major city, so, no we aren’t there yet. Today it would take a large conspiracy of highly intelligent, well-funded psychotics. But 50-70 years from now, and average post-doc solo nutjob will have capabilities that we can’t envision today. Unless we want to end up with a society that resembles Roger Zelazny’s ‘Lord of Light’ where a small group of people with technology keep bombing the general population back to the dark ages every few decades, we’d better figure out a way to make this kind of information harmless….

Great. Let’s make sure any knowledge considered ‘dangerous’ is kept secret, except we’ll give it to our compeltely trustworthy, uncorruptable government. They’ll keep the information safe and secure, and since they only have our best interests in mind, we won’t ever have to worry about it. Or, maybe we could eliminate all education and research, so that we don’t stumble on any other dangerous information like this ever again. Yeah, I like both of those solutions. Much better than facing the reality that we’ve got at absolute best 50-70 years before virtually any psycho with a few bucks will be able to kill a whole lot of people if they want to badly enough.

Coming from the IT profession, I cannot help but see the similarities between this publication and the many hackers who publicly present how they have defeated some of the most relied upon methods of cracking passwords, hacking protocols, and gaining access to the most relied-upon network operating systems. If the producers of those defense methods don’t clearly understand the plausibility of threats, then they are hard-pressed to expend the sometimes limited resources toward averting an attack. I can only think this sort of biotechnology must be shared in order for the “sane” scientists to get serious funding for in-depth serious solutions to such possible biological attacks/outbreaks.

The larger question this situation raises is, What responsibilities does the possession of knowledge entail? Publicizing the formula for a deadly virus might enable others to develop an anti-dote, BUT before such an anti-dote could become widespread, thousands, perhaps millions might die. This seems a terrible price for “open communication,” BUT widespread knowledge of other weapons and techniques (such as “short” trading) has led to untold deaths and misery. If we think it advisable, or mandatory to “reign in” this disclosure, why not “reign in” other momentous forms of knowledge? As a pragmatist, may I unapologetically contend that the appropriate criteria in ALL such cases is the risk involved. For instance, in this particular case, is there a risk that some one or group will use the disclosed knowledge to actually engineer AND RELEASE such a virus? YES, OF COURSE there is such a risk – in this case, a VERY GREAT RISK! In a social or political environment in which there is a “free-for-all” permitted, the dangers of malcontents using such knowledge for socio-pathological purposes, is extremely high. We are now, both locally and globally, in such a “free-for-all” environment. Historically, almost every form of knowledge that became available, was subsequently used in ways detrimental to the well-being and lives of many human beings. ALL of those who contribute to these possibilities, are responsible for the outcomes. The ONLY rationale for the production and use of knowledge, is the general well-being of humanity – to pretend otherwise is psychopathology – to practice otherwise is sociopathology. In the modern rush to promote individual rights, we are neglecting the equally important concept of individual responsibilities. Will we never learn the good sense of balancing rights with responsibilities?

It dangerous, but you also make it easier to research and make a vaccine for the virus, because more people know about it, and the vast majority of them would go after crated a cure/vaccine, then spread the disease.